Memo To Media: More Big Questions Remain About Bush And The Iran No-Nuke Intel
December 7, 2007 -- 12:20 PM EST // //

It seems to me that the key questions about President Bush and the new National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran suspended its nuke program years ago are getting lost in all the noise here.

Those questions are: Was the White House's intention -- provided that the new intel remained classified -- to continue to falsely hype the Iran nuke threat? Was the White House advocating for the concealment of the info with an eye towards continuing to do this?

Here's what we know so far. Back in August, Bush was privately told of the general thrust of the new intel -- he was told that the new info found that Iran's nuke program "may be suspended." This is no longer in doubt at all. White House flack Dana Perino admitted this yesterday, and the big news orgs appear to have accepted it to be the case. Three months later, however, Bush continued to hype the Iran nuke threat, albeit in somewhat vague language.

But here's the interesting point. The key isn't simply that Bush continued to hype the threat after being told it was bogus. Rather, it's that at this juncture, the NIE was still going to be kept secret. We know this because Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was saying as late as mid-November that the document would remain classified.

This presents an obvious question: Was the White House continuing to hype the threat in the expectation that the NIE would remain secret?

Bolstering this theory, we also know that Vice President Dick Cheney was actively working behind the scenes to discredit the intel. This comes to us via an oddly overlooked nugget buried in a Times piece yesterday:

[American officials] said that the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies had organized a “red team” to determine if the new information might have been part of an elaborate disinformation campaign mounted by Iran to derail the effort to impose sanctions against it.

In the end, American intelligence officials rejected that theory, though they were challenged to defend that conclusion in a meeting two weeks ago in the White House situation room, in which the notes and deliberations were described to the most senior members of President Bush’s national security team, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

“It was a pretty vivid exchange,” said one participant in the conversation.

So Cheney, one of the most hawkish voices on Iran, was trying to discredit the intel -- and his efforts were ultimately rejected by other officials who'd concluded it was valid. That seems very significant -- it suggests that top administration officials knew that the intel was lethal to their case for war, and hence tried to cast doubt on it, rather than allow officials to verify its worth.

So again, here are the larger questions which to my knowledge haven't been answered yet: Did the White House actively lobby to keep the info concealed? To what degree did Cheney and other Iran hawks try to discredit the info? Why was the decision to release it ultimately made -- could other officials, alarmed by the efforts of Iran hawks, threaten to leak it? Did administration officials fear that this would happen?

There's tons more here.

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